Graphs Beyond the Hairball

Anyone who’s ever done graph visualization has at one point or another run into the dreaded “Hairball” : Where the sheer number of connections overwhelms the data leading to a giant solid blot of connecting lines, obscuring anything useful.  Robert Kosara has a short discussion of the problem and a few solutions to it such as PivotGraph and Parallel Sets.

For a while now, people in visualization have talked about the graph without the graph, i.e., graph visualization without the hairballs. Networks are clearly important and challenging data, and it seems a bit myopic to only look at node-link visualization. Node quilts and the PivotGraph represent promising steps into a very different direction. While they require more work to understand and are more limited in what they can be used for, they are also much directed towards a goal than just showing all of the data. I think that this kind of thinking will lead us to much more interesting techniques in the future than trying to teach the old node-link diagram new tricks.

via Graphs Beyond the Hairball | eagereyes.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.